5 Business Success Stories on Twitter: The 140 Character Magic

Twitter is popularly known as the “SMS of the Internet”. Launched in the year 2006, Twitter is world’s 11th most popular site as per Alexa. Some experts classify Twitter as a social media website whereas others love to term it as micro-blogging website. Whatever be the definition, there is no doubt that Twitter is a big hit.

As of now, more than 500 million active users on Twitter generate around 340 million Tweets with 1.6 billion search queries every 24 hours. Reportedly, Twitter is all set to raise nearly $1 Billion from advertisements revenue by 2014.

Woof! That is pretty huge.

For those who have lived in a cave for the last 5 years: One can compose a short 140 character message on Twitter, called as a tweet, and share it with their followers. That message would be visible to all those who are following that particular Twitter user. There are only two types of personas in Twitter: Followers and Following. Those who are following YOU are known as Followers and those YOU follow are the “Following”. Just for your information, your favourite blog Trak.in has 2434 followers and they are following 462 users as of April 2, 2013. In total, Trak.in has tweeted a whooping 8094 tweets! Do follow us here.

In this post, we shall discuss some amazing business success stories which happened on Twitter. Being an Online Marketer and a would-be-Entrepreneur, I was simply bewitched with these data.

What they achieved: 150,000 tweets in the first few hours of their campaign. Sudden 50% spike in their followers count and 44% engagement percentage on mobile.

How they achieved: They used Promoted Tweets option, which is paid advertisement on Twitter. But before that, they partnered with a digital creative agency DDB and created an exclusive game called Polowers which is a mixture of Polo and followers. A small micro-site was created for the game and the user had to follow their Twitter account in order to play the game. You can read the full story here.

What they achieved: Top sales day in the company history; $50,000 raised for Stand Up to Cancer; 25% increase in loyalty program signups

How they achieved: They created a Twixclusive; which is an exclusive event only for Twitter fans. It was a one-day flash sales for all Twitter users wherein $5 per booking was contributed to the Stand Up to Cancer not-for-profit event. Users responded overwhelmingly and everybody won. You can read the full story here.

You can find lot more successful business stories on Twitter by clicking this link.

In India, Twitter base is still quite small compared to US and UK and hence we do not have too many Indian Business success stories on twitter. However, I am quite confident that we would soon start seeing some homegrown success stories as well. Do let us know if you know of any!

Mohul keenly observes the nuances of Indian startup world; and tries to demystify the secrets behind Technology, Marketing, Mobile and Internet. He is a Writer by passion, Marketer by choice and Entrepreneur by compulsion. Follow him on Twitter here: @_mohul